Chris Bogia, Matt Borruso, Stacy Fisher, Hein Koh, Jeffrey Ralston, Deb Sokolow, Ann Toebbe

Home baked cookies with discount soda; a birthday card with a five dollar bill inside; something roasting in the kitchen; mothball housecoats, vintage jewelry and hairspray; denture jars, veiny hands and that broken hip…

What stereotypes and personal associations do we attach to the word “grandma”? This exhibition invited artists to contemplate their own experience of family, memory, and the cultural divide between youth and old age. Who remembers grandma without thinking about growing older, about being old, loneliness, fulfillment, and death?

Chris Bogia uses string and nails and lots of yarn to make flowerpots in appreciation of crafty old ladies’ home décor. Matt Borruso made a grotesque school portrait of a young-old person with a huge red nose and oversized ears. Stacy Fisher connects her Grandma and new Grandma-in-law with a spaghetti & meatballs sculpture made from patterned fabric and paper maché. Hein Koh remembers her grandmother’s native home through the endless amounts of chili peppers she dried on straw mats in the living room. Jeffrey Ralston assembles bright collages deconstructing his mother’s drawings of Aunt Ruth’s memories of Grandmother’s house in Fountain Bridge, GA. Deb Sokolow maps the paranoid delusions of questionable tenants in a Chicago apartment building and its gossipy 80 year old superintendent, Abby (a.k.a “Grandma”). Ann Toebbe channels Grandma Moses in faux-folksy paintings of her childhood memories of her grandmother’s farm in Southern Indiana.

Brooklyn Fire Proof is pleased to present Grandma, an exhibition organized by Ann Toebbe.